 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Is it impossible to schedule enough time to include users in your design process? Is it difficult to incorporate elaborate user-centered design techniques into your own standard design practices? Do the resources needed seem overwhelming?
This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources.
Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design-all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare!
*Includes real project examples with actual customer data that illustrate how a CD project actually works.
*Covers the entire scope of a project, from deciding on the number and type of interviews, to interview set up and analyzing collected data. Sample project schedules are also included for a variety of different types of projects.
*Provides examples of how-to write affinity notes and affinity labels, build an affinity diagram, and step-by-step instructions for consolidating sequence models.
*Shows how to use consolidated data to define a design within tight time frames with examples of visions, storyboards, and paper prototypes.
*Introduces CDToolsT, the first application designed to support customer-centered design. |
Average Customer Rating:    Practitioner's guide to contextual design - now with more agile / scrum Karen's process is something that actually works, unlike many psudo-ethnographic customer engagement strategies.
By maintaining a connection to the customer data from the beginning to the end, it uniquely empowers you with a defensible design rationale. Something few other approaches can say.
A true roadmap for playing nicely with agile development is also something you won't find in most other customer research methodologies, especially contextual ones.
Whether or not you are willing to live the process and follow the steps outlined is another matter. Your mileage may vary, especially if you decided to line item veto particular aspects. Clarifies the line between theory and practice! If you are looking for an elegant, academic theory to suggest how contextual design might work in some controlled laboratory experiment-- this is not the book for you. This work gives step-by-step procedures on how to conduct contextual design in the real, uncontrolled world of people's lives, and how to do this work on an accelerated time schedule.
This is a clear tutorial and worthy "field manual" on contextual design, task sequence modeling, affinity diagrams, and paper prototyping for applied work in the real world.
Because it takes you through each activity step-by-step, this book does name the tools used at the time this work was crafted. Some reviewers consider that blatant advertising-- and in the case of citations for "CDTools" perhaps that's true. But in most cases it is very helpful to know that some specific products are more field-worthy than others. I strongly doubt these authors have any financial interest in boosting sales of 3M Post-It notes. (Though Amazon may profit from sales of 3M - 2051-FLT - 3M Post-it Bright Colors Memo Cube)
:-) Blurring the Lines Between Advertising and Education This was an assigned reading for a graduate level course at a Big Ten University. I wish our instructors had written their own book or selected a different text because this text is terrible in an academic setting. Flipping through the book, there are constant references to various brand names and software tools. Using the digital edition in-text search, I found the following:
-The Sharpie(r) brand appears on 6 different pages. We're instructed to buy 12 red sharpies, 12 blue sharpies, and 12 green sharpies.
-The Postit(r) brand appears on 53 unique pages. Including this gem, "Use high-end sticky notes like the Post-it(r) brand because other, less expensive brands will fall off the wall more easily over time" (page 164)
-The company 3M is mentioned on 4 unique pages.
-The software tool CDTools is mentioned on 32 distinct pages. CDTools costs $750.00. CDTool's parent company, InContext, is mentioned on 10 distinct pages. Coincidently, Co-author Karen Holtzblatt is one of the founders. Other software (such as Visio or Powerpoint) is only mentioned twice, one of which is just a client case study.
I think the statistics speak for themselves.
I think Rapid Contextual Design (as a concept) carries some weight as a business process, however it should not be put into a book that reads like a shill for their software tools. Perhaps this would be a great book to bundle with CDtools or sell to companies but is *not* appropriate for an academic setting. |  |
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